As various posters on this site have been noting for a while, the crucial problem with the Supreme Court’s decision disemboweling the Voting Rights Act is its inability to explain how it violates the Constitution. The closest the Court comes to finding a limitation on the unambiguous power delegated to Congress by the 15th Amendment is a so-called “equal sovereignty of the states.” But not only does this limitation have no textual basis, the scant doctrinal basis (as Warren said in South Carolina v. Katzenbach ) “applies only to the terms upon which States are admitted to the Union.”

In all fairness, however, as Joe also recently noted in comments there is some precedent that might lend greater support to Roberts’s position, even if he chose not to cite it for some reason. Indeed, a widely read opinion by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States assumes that the citizens of states must be treated equally by acts of Congress:

But, as we have before said, [Wisconsin territory] was acquired by the General Government as the representative and trustee of the people of the United States, and it must therefore be held in that character for their common and equal benefit, for it was the people of the several States, acting through their agent and representative, the Federal Government, who in fact acquired the Territory in question, and the Government holds it for their common use until it shall be associated with the other States as a member of the Union.

A concurring opinion is even clearer:

We know that the resolution of Congress of 1780 contemplated that the new States to be formed under their recommendation were to have the same rights of sovereignty, freedom, and independence, as the old. That every resolution, cession, compact, and ordinance of the States observed the same liberal principle. That the Union of the Constitution is a union formed of equal States, and that new States, when admitted, were to enter “this Union.”

These sovereign and independent States, being united as a Confederation, by various public acts of cession became jointly interested in territory and concerned to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting it.

Strange; why wouldn’t Roberts cite a case that provides substantially more support for his position than any case he did cite? Let’s look that up for him:

In terms of its holding that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, the Taney Court actually faced similar problems to those faced by the Roberts Court in its desire to gut the Voting Rights Act. On the one hand, The Constitution explicitly says that “[t]he Congress shall have power to…make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory,” while on the other hand no provision seems to explicitly bar a ban on slavery. In fairness to Taney and his justly discredited brethren, unlike the Roberts Court they at least didn’t rely fully on a made-up equal sovereignty argument; they also adduced a Fifth Amendment right for individuals to take property into the territory. This isn’t a very good argument either, but it’s not quite as bad, and in the antebellum context the general (although not the particular) claim actually had some cross-partisan support. (McLean, one of the dissenters, accepted a due process right to take property into territories in principle, but denied that it applied to slavery, since slaves could only be property if made so by the positive law of a given jurisdiction.) But the idea that the territories belonged equally to people of all states was the core of the argument that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, an argument that in 1857 found there way into a Supreme Court opinion.

To be clear, I’m not making a Jonah Goldberg argument here, trying to argue that because the Roberts Court relied on logic similar to that used by people who opposed the constitutionality of the Missouri compromise that the Court secretly wants to restore slavery. What I am saying is that Roberts’s opinion rests on an utterly anachronistic vision of federal power that was highly dubious before the Civil War Amendments and was rendered completely nonsensical after they were passed. And while the moral implications of compact theory were worse in the antebellum era, as a matter of constitutional law the argument is even worse in the 21st century than it was in the middle of the 19th. The fact that this anachronistic states’ rights interpretation of federal power has consistently been used to oppose federal protections of civil rights and is still being used to do so isn’t a coincidence, but it’s wrong on every level. We fought a civil war against the premises that Shelby County uncritically invokes. But striking down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act is the latest example of the party of Lincoln transforming into the party of Calhoun.

Comments (199)

The reference in a footnote to Jefferson’s opposition to the Missouri Compromise is also sort of before its time — it would have been quite appropriate for some blog comment selectively citing Jefferson on the wrongness of some piece of federal legislation.

His dissent is often forgotten in lieu of Justice Curtis, who overall was more conservative on the issue of slavery etc., including opposing various moves by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Both dissents have good stuff.

Right. As Mark Graber points out, Jonah Goldberg-style arguments about Dred Scott won’t get you very far, since Curtis was just as committed to white supremacy and contemptuous of abolitionists as Taney.

But of course, “penumbras” and “emanations” are relevant in detemining the meaning of “due process of law” under the 14th Amendment. The rationale for using them to find a limit on the power of Congress under the 15th Amendment is, to put it very mildly, unclear.

Me personally, I’m okay with Griswold, at least the principle. Funny sounding words could have been avoided, but the idea, particularly since it arguably tried to limit the reach of substantive due process by tying it to text more, is sound. Roberts after all quoted McCulloch.

I’m less okay with selective application. Roberts, to be fair, is not like Scalia here. He and Alito at least for sake of argument will support a “right to privacy” to some degree.

Roberts doesn’t care much about limiting a “right to privacy,” to the extent it doesn’t hamper the corporate national security state. (Remember who’s appointed all the FISA judges who have been letting NSA spy on every American with a phone, a mailbox, or a computer.)

Shelby County was purely and simply about fewer Democratic votes, and the correlating chance of a Republican president’s being elected in 2016 to keep the Court right-wing for another generation. That’s what Roberts cares about. The man knows his priorities.

FISA judges have been appointed back to the 1970s; the ultimate problem there is more the breadth of the law. Not that the likes of John Bates (who has been reasonable on various executive power issues) let the NSA check my mailbox too much or something because Roberts picked him.

If his concern is mostly to protect corporations, women should be glad as to the right to choose et. al. Probably a bit too optimistic though.

It must be nice to be one of the most powerful individuals in this country and be answerable to basically nobody, meaning, to We the People through an impeachment process that has about as much chance of being used as I do of taking Roberts’ place on the Court.

Horace Cooper, who pleaded guilty to some minor charges during the Abramoff Experience, was on Real Time two weeks ago crowing about how he had advocated for the Shelby County outcome in an amicus brief based on the equal sovereignty nonsense. To my astonishment, Maher was ready with a quote from Posner–the one about how the equal sovereignty principle “rests on air”–but then Cooper responded with a dissembling aside about the admission-to-the-union exception you cited above, while having the gall to accuse Posner of being somehow less informed than he.

(I’m amazed at Maher’s ability to tap into this bottomless well of disingenuous black conservatives. Cooper was no Ron Christie, but give him time…)

That case wasn’t an admission to the case. Purportedly, it was a case about the State of Oklanhoma moving its Capitol and how the Court said Oklahoma is a state like any other and can move its Capitol “because all states have equal rights.”

I suppose if Wisconsin were treated worse than Nevada for no damn reason at all, the absence of a textual basis or a real doctrine of equal sovereignty wouldn’t be an obstacle to striking the discriminatory law. But where Congress has specific constitutional authority, and bases its action upon something rational, I’d think you would need something more.

Since you mentioned Maher’s “bottomless well of disingenuous black conservatives,” what about his bottomless well of (relatively) hot right-wing women? Where does he find them, and how do they get on the show? Do they get on the same way the disingenuous black conservatives do, or is there a different process? Inquiring — and dirty — minds want to know.

Cooper is an idiot. The majority opinion in Coyle rests upon the fact that the United States government does not have the power to designate the capitals of the constituent states:

Congress may embrace in an enabling act conditions relating to matters wholly within its sphere of powers, such as regulations of interstate commerce, intercourse with Indian tribes, and disposition of public lands, but not conditions relating wholly to matters under state control such as the location and change of the seat of government of the State.

What’s other conditions are related to matters wholly within [Congress’s] sphere of powers? By way of Section 2 of the 15th Amendment, ensuring that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

It’s one thing to meander on about “Oklahoma blah blah blah Guthrie blah blah blah Article 4, Section 3 blah blah blah presto-change-o equal sovereignty of the states.” What Cooper and his cohort can’t contend with is the simple fact that in order for the states to be “equal sovereigns” they first have to be “sovereign.” And with respect to abolishing racial discrimination in elections, the states stopped being sovereign at the exact second that the 15th Amendment was ratified.

And if the 15th amendment (or any other provision of the constitution) gave Congress the power to designate the location state capitals, Oklahomans would have had to wait another three years before moving theirs from Guthrie to Oklahoma City.

What I am saying is that is that Roberts’s opinion rests on an utterly anachronistic vision of federal power that was highly dubious before the Civil War Amendments and was rendered completely nonsensical after they were passed.

Only those who are net taxpayers, who pay more into the government than they get back, should have the right to vote. This would exclude food stamp recipients, those on welfare, “disability”, and all public employees.

This will help us avoid the downfall of republican government caused by the people realizing they can vote themselves funds out of the public treasury.

With that in place, the next step would be requiring an IQ test before being allowed to vote. All those with an IQ under 95 would be banned from the franchise, as they have not the intellectual capacity for responsible self-government (i.e. the Rachel Jeantels of the world).

The number of people on disability since 2009 has skyrocketed in recent years as you can see here.

There is no other explanation for this than massive fraud. That any more people don’t become legitimately disabled in such a short period of time. No, they’re living their lives at the tit of Uncle Sugar.

were you the idiot advising the head of the DEA, when he recently testified before congress, regarding the increased amount of opioids that the pharmaceutical companies were being allowed to manufacture? you must have been, because an intelligent advisor would have pointed out that the population is aging. and historically, elderly people tend to suffer more from constant pain, that liver killing ibuprofren has little to no effect on.

Does it hurt to be this stupid? The population has aged, women entered the work-force, and the Recession forced employers to fire the people they used to employ.

Would it shock you to know (anything?) that SSA predicted the number of people on Disability back in the 90’s:

If we go back to the projections in the 1996 Social Security trustees report, the disability program was projected to cost 1.93 percent of payroll in 2005. As it turned out, the program cost just 1.85 percent of payroll in 2005, about 4 percent less than the trustees had projected in 1996. The program’s cost did explode in the downturn, rising to 2.43 percent of payroll in 2011, with a projection of 2.48 percent of payroll for last year.

Oops.

Maybe it WOULD make you feel better to know that the percentage of people winning their hearings dropped from 62% to 46% from 2010 to 2012. Sure the number of case in Federal Court exploded and SSA is now losing more than 55% in Federal Court, but at least you’re keeping the “Popeye’s chicken eating crowd” from receiving that massive $1000/month

This is patently false, it was only with the New Deal, and especially with the “Great” Society that the people had the full ability to vote themselves government bennies in exchange for nothing.

While I also disagree with corporate welfare at least corporations produce goods, services, and jobs. The only thing morons like Rachel Jeantel give us in exchange is popping out more morons who will need more EBT, more schooling, more Medicaid, more more more.

It was only with the New Deal, and especially with the “Great” Society that the people had the full ability to vote themselves government bennies in exchange for nothing.

Uh, what? We had universal manhood suffrage (leaving aside those pesky future Popeye’s customers) since the Age of Jackson. The people had all the “ability” they wanted. Your thesis is a stupid one, even leaving aside the obvious fact that social welfare programs have a solid conservative (even reactionary) basis; look up “Otto von Bismarck” sometime.

We did not have government welfare programs that gave a dependent class something in exchange for nothing until the New Deal, and it was expanded to unsustainable levels with the “Great” Society. This is a fact.

Our ancestors in the Age of Jackson did not have EBT, TANF, Medicaid, affirmative action, make-work government jobs or anything else and they did just fine. Their only day-to-day interaction with the federal government was the Post Office or, if they were on the frontier, the army when it fought the Indians.

no, our ancestors had subsistence farming or indentured servitude, short life spans, high rates of infant mortality, mothers dying in childbirth, people packed like rats into cites dying of typhoid because there was no socialist thing like sanitation,

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oh for christ’s sake. why am i bothering with such an obvious jackass?

If you want a good example of what happens when the dependent, illiterate underclass grows too large and collapses on itself (after all the productive taxpayers leave) look at Detroit, Gary Indiana, East St. Louis, or Petersburg, Virginia. All once great cities destroyed by “Great” Society liberalism.

I’m absolutely fascinated by the idea that someone who’s only in the public eye because they’re testifying in a murder trial is becoming a synonym for Those Stupid People. Completely mortified (to the extent I have the capacity for that, still), but fascinated at the same time.

Then again, you can use affinity for Popeye’s as an un-ironic insult, so we’ve certainly established that you have a lot of issues to work through.

Hate is a strong word. I strongly dislike the fact that we are subsidizing the breeding of low IQ individuals who will never amount to anything in an age of high-tech international economic competition and existential environmental crisis.

The New Deal? The Homestead Act of 1862 gave away a quarter of a billion acres of land to private citizens. Does that not count as the citizenry voting itself “largess out of the public treasury” because that largess didn’t come in the form of sweet, sweet cash?

When formulating your answer to that question, keep in mind that black people were not prohibited by law from participating in the program.

It was a minority of that land that had people on it to begin with, but what of the land that was taken by force? Who cares? It’s happened millions of time in history. The higher civilization drives out the hunter-gatherers. It was going to happen no matter what old world civilization the Amerinds came in contact with.

Well, except for their vast maize, bean, and squash farms, yes, he saw it Dances with Wolves. You remember him? He was the one loudly rooting against Costner before he stomped out screaming “Miscregnagist”.

“While I also disagree with corporate welfare at least corporations produce goods, services, and jobs.”

that’s the great thing about 1A, you can say any stupid thing you want, with no basis in fact behind it, and you won’t be put in jail. you’ll just be mocked for your display of flat-out ignorance.

1. corporations get the lion’s share of government largesse, in terms of special tax deductions (some made up out of thin air. the domestic production deduction comes to mind.) plus all kinds of special tax credits, many of them targeted to specific industries. amortization of acquired assets having no determinable useful life (good will). special 10 year loss carrybacks (for cleaning up the environmental mess you made in the first place). shit, I could go on all night.

next time you’re in a store, check the label on that pair of “American” made jeans, and see where they’re actually being made. they speak a foreign language there.

A few Klan meeting barns, lit up like torches, a few neo-nazis with axes through their skulls, and a couple Grand Moff Beagles carved up like turkeys, all coupled with some pix mailed to the Dumb White Supremacist Punditsphere asking if they’ve checked the lock on the back door…

you dumbass. did you even bother to check the date of that video? no, you probably didn’t. it’s 2009, right at the height of the real estate crash-n-burn, brought to us by your heroes, the white knights of the finance sector.

near Ft. Myer, FL, there were see through buildings of $300k condos, either unsold or abandoned, for the same reason those houses in Detroit (and the see through office buildings in downtown Detroit) were abandoned. the skin color may have been different, the reason was the same.

No, most whites are merely hypocrites. Saying they believe in “diversity” while flocking to places like Portland and Utah and abandoning hellholes like Detroit and Los Angeles. They’re racial realists, even if they won’t admit it. No white parent in their right mind would send their child to a 90%+ black high school if they can help it, even if they’re liberal Democrats.

Yes, but they left the city didn’t they? Hmmm…wonder why that could be? And why are the Detroit suburbs still very pleasant places (despite the troubles of the domestic auto industry!) but the city is a dysfunctional shithole?

One wonders if your grasp of demographics is as poor as your grasp of economics or history or civics. I have yet to see a citation to your demographic numbers or one to Stormfront or VDare for your bullshit “talented Tenth theory.” A theory disproved by human evolution (we ALL cam from Africa), human genetics, and human history

Appalachia is poor, yet we never hear about welfare riots or violent flash mobs in Mingo County, now do we? Nobody in eastern Kentucky is afraid of leaving their doors unlocked at night, or worries about getting killed in a drive-by and so on.

Appalachia could actually benefit from increased government investment precisely because its residents really are being held back by material conditions, not their innate lack of intelligence.

When whites live in poverty most of the time its due to factors such as economic isolation. MOST of the time. There are stupid whites, but there are a lot less stupid whites than stupid blacks. And even when whites are desperately poor, they still aren’t as violent or criminal as blacks. That’s why nobody would be afraid to spend a night eastern Kentucky or West Virginia even with their doors unlocked. You’re more likely to be killed by a wild animal than a hillbilly there.

Another apt comparison would be between Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. Since the end of Communism, Eastern Europeans have rapidly improved their economies and standard of living once freed from that idiotic ideology, and in a space of just a little over 20 years.

Black Africa has had nearly 60 years now to do the same (and with no legacy of Commmunism) but is poorer now than it was when the white man left.

The white man left Sub-Saharan Africa? I think you should look at the passports from the nice engineers and corporate officers of BP and Shell. Seems to me, a lot of visits to Nigeria….Hell, my nice, white cousin spent a good two years in Africa training their military how to shoot people.

I think you might know less about Africa than you America, which, as has been established, is not a lot

South Korea, despite having zero mineral resources went from being poorer than Ghana in 1950 to being a wealthy, developed nation today once colonialism ended. Africa did not. This is because the average IQ of an East Asian is 106, and that of the average Black African is in the 70s. They do not have enough intelligent people to successfully run a techno-industrial state in the style of Europeans or East Asians.

How come South Korea has climbed the ladder from agriculture, to light industry, to heavy industry, to high tech industry in 50 years and not Nigeria? Why does the former give us cell phones, automobiles, and microprocessors while the latter gives us nothing but simple resource extraction and internet scams?

A great idea, actually, would be a program to move Appalachian whites out of their dying coal towns (which will never come back, we CANNOT continue to use coal) and re-settle them in abandoned Detroit homes. Give it 20 years and Detroit will be a great city again.

Jen seems not to have grasped that every one in the country gets more value from the government than they pay in taxes. That’s why government was invented. If he/she doesn’t like it, he/she can emigrate to Somalia.

Only those who are net taxpayers, who pay more into the government than they get back, should have the right to vote.

This would mean almost nobody would have the right to vote, since just about everyone in the country pays less in taxes than the benefits they derive from the feds.

My Dad is a high-flying Doctor with a pretty high tax rate. It SEEMS like he pays more than he gets back. But you know what? His daily commute is government-subsidized (roads). Most of his patients are paying him with government-subsidized funds (either through employer-provided health insurance, which only exists because of the government, or via explicit government programs.) The payments he receives, themselves, are government supported; the government created the universal medium of exchange he accepts as currency and the currency legal guarantees that he may use that medium to settle all his debts, public and private.

The government paid for twelve years of his education. The government makes sure his water and air are clean (to an extent); he doesn’t pay for that himself. And I’m just scratching the tip of the iceberg, here.

I’m speaking of welfare parasites and other non-productive elements. They should not vote for the same reason we don’t allow 10 year olds to vote. They don’t have the mental capacity for self-government, and have no stake in society beyond collecting their Obama Bucks.

If you understand “on average” then your question about Bill Cosby and Neil DeGrasse Tyson is irrelevant. They’re part of the old Talented Tenth of Booker T. Washington. But there are not enough of these in enough of a critical mass for blacks to successfully compete in a modern, techno-industrial civilization.

This might not go the way you want it to. This would include the military, the civilian part of the military, and the millions of early military retirees living off of benefits. That segment of the population is basically a Republican vote machine.

By extension, we should include the many millions of people who are employed with private firms that get their money from contracts with the War Department and the DHS (or as I prefer it, in the original German, Der Heimlandversicherheitsamt ). Add in all retirees on Social Security. Both population segments that strongly lean Republican.

After that we can go after all the farmers (and their employees) who live off of dairy price supports and other farm subsidies. Get all of those GOP voters off of the voting rolls.

Of course, that’s the fundamental problem. The Gullible Oligarch Party imagines that they are the rugged individualists who are the only ones working to pay taxes, when in reality they are first in line at the government teat.

Only those who are net taxpayers, who pay more into the government than they get back, should have the right to vote. This would exclude food stamp recipients, those on welfare, “disability”, and all public employees.

LOL. The biggest net beneficiaries of government-bestowed privilege are landowners.

The Republican party will never support such a bill because such a bill would cover the majority of their voting base. The Dems would never support it because it is disgusting, essentialist, aristocratic, patronistic nonsense. Here’s a hint; the fact that you want to tell veterans who’ve lost their limbs in war and families working multiple jobs but, due to shitty wages, still struggling under the poverty line that they can’t vote is why people don’t like you. You’re a jerk, people see that about you, and they’d rather avoid it.

The rest of this is equal hogwash. “The downfall of Republican government”? It’d be nice if you incompetent boobs could point to one -just one- democratic government in the history of the world that bankrupted itself through too-rich subsidies to the citizenry. Greece failed because it’s corrupt elites were more interested in helping Goldman loot the treasury than civic duty; the US devastated its economy -though not anywhere near its treasury- for practically the same reason; Iceland the same deal. This entire theory, going back all the way to goddamn Plato(and doesn’t he have a lot of bad thinking to answer for?), is built entirely on air! It’s nothing but nebulous theory masquerading as “hard-nosed”, “pragmatic” “common-sense”, which -Hey!- describes conservative political philosophy pretty well overall when you think about it.

Everywhere you look it’s never “the people” voting themselves subsidies that breaks a government; it’s “the elite”, because what’s the point of social status if not the “right” to loot everyone else? It’s inescapable human nature to want to protect and expand what you have for the sake of your children, and the more you have, the more you have to do to accomplish this, and eventually you have so much that to keep it growing you’ve got to rob the rest of society entire. This is one of the major drivers of political corruption and dissolution and you don’t have to trust a liberal like me; just read Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, the chapters on the French Revolution specifically though they’re hardly the first place he discusses this. But of course you won’t do that, because you’re an idiot and a sycophant and thinking isn’t your forte; better to let men you don’t know, who’ve never done a single minute of primary research in their lives, tell you how the world is than spend the time and effort required to actually understand a topic. Why, that would take some smidgen of integrity, curiosity, and effort! Fools like you who saunter about ironically blanketed in the moniker of “Truth” don’t truck with that sort of thing.

well, the basic reason this will never come to pass, is that the constitution makes no mention of even being a taxpayer, to have the franchise. somehow, I doubt that amendment passes muster with anyone.

While the still-beating heart of Segregation Forever! is what provides political support for the decision in Shelby County, the decision is really about political power. Roberts doesn’t see African-American voters, he sees Democratic voters.

Roberts is consistent in his support for the corporate ruling class. There is no evidence that he cares about anything else.

Liberals need to realize that Socialist programs can only exist in relatively homogeneous, high IQ societies like Denmark, Japan, or Portland, Oregon. Add low IQ racial group “diversity” to the mix and you end up with a dependent underclass that will do nothing but breed and suck up taxpayer dollars until the parasite bankrupts the host. Even Sweden is now finding this out with all the Somalis Bantus and Arabs its taken in in recent years. Now they have race riots even in Sweden despite the most generous welfare benefits on planet Earth. Something that was unthinkable when Sweden was, well, 100% Swedish.

“Truth” is a little refreshing in being an overtly vile racist pile of shit, instead of trying to hide his racism behind code words like the usual trolls.

And government doing its’ job and providing for the poor goes way back before the New Deal, at least as far as when Julius Caesar and Publius Clodius implemented the free grain dole (which was already heavily subsidized) for the Roman head count.

I do find it interesting how liberals (correctly!) ridicule conservatives for their idiotic belief in young Earth creationism and (again correctly) their ludicrous denial of man-made climate change, while engaging in the pseudoscience that all races of men are equal in ability and intellect on average. Believing in the latter is just as stupid as believing that Jesus rode a dinosaur.

I’d ask you to cite some studies that support your position, but you’re Jenny, and we know you’re not actually interested in the latest salvo in your desperate, attention-seeking gotcha game, where the true loser of every round is your own dignity.

That’s the thing about the race science morons. They can’t get published in actual scholarly place. They have to crawl to magazine editors with hangups and wingnut welfare outfits to get their stuff published and they claim it’s because of a liberal conspiracy, as opposed to the fact that none of them have an actual hypothesis about how genetics are driving intelligence.

Why would anyone read an old science book that most scientists have concluded is just a bunch just-so stories in service of a ill-informed, poisonous ideology?

Jason Richwine, before he was figuratively burned at the stake for stating obvious scientific truths, managed to get a PhD from Harvard and his thesis was on the lower IQ of Hispanics relative to whites.

That’d be the dissertation he needed four interns to help him with? Ah, the master race.

And, while it might be politically correct in your circles to read them, pretty much everyone in Charles Murray’s alleged field wrote takedowns of his dreck when Weird Andy Sullivan published it in the New Republic.

Jenny, usually so quick to confuse correlation and causation, seems totally unable to grasp the relation between his behavior and how much he hates his life, so he needs it to be the liberal conspiracy’s fault.

If you want a good example of what happens when the dependent, illiterate underclass grows too large and collapses on itself (after all the productive taxpayers leave) look at Detroit, Gary Indiana, East St. Louis, or Petersburg, Virginia. All once great cities destroyed by “Great” Society liberalism.

Strange to use Petersburg as an example, any coincidence that it is right next to COLONIAL HEIGHTS?

Oh, come on. I was a vile racist scumbag traitor and mass murderer, but I wasn’t a bad cavalry commander and had some personal physical courage. This “Truth” coward seems to have no meaningful or useful skill set.

You know, saying “I’m not a racist, I just really and truly believe black people are stupid” does not in fact make you not a racist, but in fact prooves that you are a giant stinking putrid racist, one of the biggest racists around, along with proving that you are a complete failure at science.

The funny thing is, I remember trying to engage with a more-coherent race IQ theorist on this, and the payoff to all this caterwauling and carrying on about IQ was that it proves affirmative action doesn’t work. Ie, it proves something they already think for other reasons. I guess sometimes it’s fun to go the roundabout way.

Until you repudiate it, you really have no right to make fun of Young Earth Creationists or climate change deniers. You’re doing the same thing they are: denying scientific truths in the name of ideology.

Why is always projection with you people? You run around in circles and pay scholars with little integrity to come up with fancy justifications for what you already believe and then accuse the reality-based community of being creationists. You’ve got to know deep down that this shit is stupid. Being white just doesn’t make you any better than anyone else. As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time around white people, I feel pretty confident in this.

You can scream about ghettos all day long, but you won’t understand them when you seek the explanations in magic blood. (Because you guys don’t demonstrate any real understanding of DNA.) Listing the ways that government policy and the actions of the then-white majority went about creating East St. Louis won’t do any good. After reading your posts here, my impression is that you don’t have the capacity to, say, read the history of Korea and that of Nigeria and come up with more plausible explanations for how they developed than magic blood. I don’t have any reason to believe your incapacity is genetic, though.

Once again, we learn that anyone who claims any sort of possession of “the truth” – either bringing it or using it as a handle – is full of shit as a Christmas goose. Disenfranchise the bulk of the population, no, that’s not elitist and butt-numbingly stupid at all.

Is there more to say? You’ve done great work on this and the thing that needs to happen next is that someone in Congress needs to bring this up for a vote. Since that won’t happen in the next few years, all we can do is agree with you that the principle is crap; the decision politically motivated; and, Jason Malloy was more fun to argue with than John “Imperial Oligarch” Roberts

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[…] You can bet that’s exactly what King had in mind! And he totally would support the same Court that brought Roger Taney’s legal theories out of the mothballs to gut the Voting Rights Act ending disparate impact analysis […]

[…] such utter crap with a straight face. Where is the clear “rule” mandating that “the equal sovereign dignitude of the states trumps the powers explicitly granted to Congress under t…“? Where does it say that “states must use uniform vote counting methods if not doing so […]

[…] 2 19th century precedents every bit as egregious as Plessy or Dred Scott. Roberts in Shelby County was shrewd enough not to cite Dred Scott even as he relied on its constitutional logic. But Rehnquist can cite equally white supremacist […]

[…] of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedents not written by John Roberts, save for the infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford. If the Roberts Court is willing to cut the heart out of the most important civil rights statute […]

[…] Court decides to hear a voting rights case. It has upheld voter ID laws on the one hand, and struck down a crucial provision of the Voting Rights Act on the other. Today, however, was a rare exception. A […]

[…] I can’t give you an example of a judge explicitly citing Dred Scott. But I can give you an example of the Chief Justice of the United States joined by four of his brethren using Dred Scott… in order to place an extratextual limitation on the powers explicitly granted to Congress by […]

[…] as “the powers grated to Congress by Section 2 of the 15th Amendment are constrained by the Equal Sovereign Dignitude of the states, which can be located in the text of the Constitution…hmm, ok, but it is deeply embedded in […]